Couple more pics...and a new dog!

So I decided to add a new pet to my list of animals here...and its a dog. Its a girl and is really cute, only a month old and clumsy as hell. But the important thing is that I dont have a name for it yet so I need some help with suggestions, either send me an email or post a comment with an idea for a name.

The last picture is of the bull rink for the bull riding...my friend has a picture of me riding a bull but he is emailing me that so it should be up next blog post.

Finally, I am running out of things to post about so send me an email of questions and I will post some answers to what everyone wants to know!

Hope all is well...

Some pictures for you....

Well first I must apologize cause they are not in order but it will take too long to reorganize and its taken me over 1.5 hours to get these up...but here ya go...

This first picture is my lovely living room, here you can see the elegant couch and chairs. Also in the pic you get a quick look into my kitchen as well. Basically my house has two room, this is the kitchen and living room and then there is the bedroom that follows. Got my nice little hammock here for reading and relaxing and the bookshelf on the left there has all my work shit.

Here is my bedroom, quite simple. Got my dresser and closet, just outside of the picture is a little table that I have all my dailies on.

Here is a picture from the outside of my house. The bedroom is a side room of to the left of the house. I have a small yard to the right, where I have a shower and latrine. I am also in the process of planting a garden so I didn´t take any picture of that area.

The next two picture are from a youth group beach trip I took some kids from my community on. I managed to stuff 23 kids into a truck and we drove for 3 hours to the beach. We did manage to stop in Leon on the way for a museum and also to see the biggest church in Central America. It was an awesome trip as none of the kids had ever been to Leon before or seen the ocean. All the kids were asking ¨why are there waves?¨ and ¨why is the water salty?¨.

Anyway, this is also a pic of one of the girls that I lived with for the first month I lived in my new site, she has helped me a lot with Spanish. She also has the best name ever ¨Meleidy¨.

Here you can see the beach in the backround and the overcrowded bed of the truck. In total we stuffed 20 kids in the bed. The girl standing up in pink is another of the girls that I stayed with the first month, her name is Damirel.

This is my neighbor and fighting buddy, his name is Everet and is the most well behaved little kid I have met. Which is saying a lot as most kids down here are brats. Anyway, because he is so well behaved he always gets what he wants, so when you tell him no it is absolutely hilarious because he just doesnt understand the word ¨no¨.

Here is a picture of the Peace Corps Director in my site. If you don´t remember what I look like I am behind him in the white shirt. Yes, my hair is completely short, and no I don´t like it.

Here is the Nicaraguan police that came out to protect the Director on his site visit. Which is a joke because my site is like the safest place in the entire world. But I was going to ask one of the guys to borrow a gun for a picture but I chickened out.

Here is a Tarantula that was in my house, it is one of three that I have killed in my house.

Here is a scorpion that was in my house, one of four that I have killed in my house.

Here is a picture of my cat, the big one, and her kitten. The kitten I gave to my sitemate Marlena as cat food is rediculously expensive down here and I didn´t want a second cat. But she is cute none the less.

Oh the month of January...

So what a crazy month this has been! As you all know I have not posted in a month and that’s for a couple reasons. Mainly though Peace Corps rules don’t allow me to leave my town overnight for my first three months in my site, thus I only have roughly four hour to get everything I need done in town. This includes grocery shopping, eating (need a little meat in the diet), answering emails and checking up on the happening in the world (aka SPORTS). Also, to upload pictures takes just under an hour. Thus when I do update the blog it is usually one of the few things that I get to do while in town.

Anyway, the month started off with the New Years celebrations. This was an exciting time as roughly twenty of the other Ag volunteers that I trained with all met in a beach town for four day and relaxed. We enjoyed some time in the beach but not after a little scare. The first fifteen minutes we were playing with a football in the water when my friend felt a sting in his foot and it was bleeding profusely. After talking to the people in the hostel we were staying at we found out that what stung him was a sting ray (Yes the same thing that killed the Crocodile Hunter) immediately after that he was sent to get the poison removed from his foot. After a day of total pain and a week of walking with a limp he is now fine, however, needless to say everyone entered the water a little slower for the next couple days. But overall it was a great trip, great seeing everyone and some amazing sunsets as you saw in the pictures.

The next major event was a visit by the Peace Corps Director for the entire WORLD!!! He decided to make a four day stop in Nicaragua for some meetings with the government and to check on the volunteers. Well during his time here the PC Nicaragua directors decided to have him visit two sites. Well lucky me, my site got picked for one of the sites for him to visit. See here we are working on that bean project that I have mentioned before, however the PC Nicaragua staff loves this project because it involved cross sector work between volunteers. I help the town with quality control and Ag practices while a small business volunteer comes in and helps with business and selling practices. Before moving on I want to also mention that immediately after leaving my site he returned to the capital of Nicaragua to have a meeting with the President of Nicaragua, yeah I like to say I am about on the same level as the President of Nicaragua.

So anyways back to the story, we are told that there will be three PC vehicles coming and we are supposed to entertain the Director and eleven other high ups for roughly an hour. Thus, myself and the business volunteer set up a presentation accordingly. We start with a welcome by the community, a brief history of the volunteers, a talk on the bean project and a quick mention of our future pig project. It was set to go all smoothly, which for a small town in the middle of nowhere Nicaragua is almost impossible to do when you have three big SUVs rolling into town. (I know I have mentioned before that there are only two trucks in the whole town, thus when three big white SUVs come in needless to say they are noticed.)

Now the quick little hour of my life turned into a HUGE circus. The PC staff failed to mention that they were also bringing a bus of news people. All four news channels in Nicaragua brought in reporters and cameras, two newspapers had reporters and regional news channels for Central America also brought in news people. It was a bonafide circus and I’m supposed to be one of the ringleaders. Well it all turned out well and the town got all excited as they all got to see their pretty little faces being interviewed on TV, however it was a freak show for me the little volunteer who doesn’t know enough Spanish to give an interview.

One interesting thing I learned on the Directors visit though was the difference from a translator and an interpreter. See a translator takes things and translates them verbatim (or as much as possible given the difficulty of that some words just don’t translate or can translate multiple ways) and there is the title of interpreter. This is a glorified word for a person who interprets what one person is saying in one language and translates it to another language who doesn’t speak the original language, they supposedly are better at translating the meaning of what the person is saying. So why is this important? Yup, the director of Peace Corps does not speak Spanish (Side note: I find this incredibly interesting as most volunteers, sorry I don’t have time to look up the statistics, work in Spanish speaking countries.)

So, I am giving a short little ten minute speech about the upcoming pig project to the Peace Corps Director. However, lucky me it has to be in Spanish because we have some community members present and thus we don’t want to alienate them. So imagine this, I am sitting there thinking in English, translating it in my head and then speaking in Spanish. Now, every half sentence or so I have to stop so this fancy little interpreter lady can translate the sentence to English. So I’m sitting here trying to maintain where I am at in the sentence and trying to make sure she is saying what I am thinking in my head…and guess what…she is twisting it ever so slightly, but this small little twist in changing the meaning of the presentation. Essentially her interpretation was giving the benefits to the people in the project but not emphasizing that the people are representing families. Small little tidbit but to me it was quite large, as there are 55 people in the project but they represent over 70 percent of the families in the town, or roughly 280 people. So what are you supposed to do? I’m sitting here thinking to myself, should I just stop the Spanish and speak in English or is that too blunt, and what happened to this whole part that she is an interpreter when she cant even interpret an American speaking Spanish. I know it was probably my fault I think a highly paid interpreter should pick up on this small little interpretive detail. So yeah if you can’t tell I am not a big fan of these famed interpreter types.

The third and final big event of the month is the Fiesta Patronales, or Party for the Patron Saints. See each town has a Patron Saint and every year they celebrate the Patron Saint, yes there is actually religious celebrations but I think it is more of another excuse to party. Sort of like our Halloween, everyone has heard of some good excuse for the holiday but no one really knows why it now promotes little kids to dress as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and beg for a trick or treat (when was the last trick ever given out?). Anyways back to the story along with a couple small religious ceremonies there is also a huge fair like area set up (think state fair).

However this is also accompanied by lots of beer drinking and BULL RIDING!!! No we don’t have Nascar down here, instead we have beer drinking and bull riding. Well this year my community leader is one of the nine sponsors, thus I have been trying to go to as many of the events as possible. Three weekends, bull riding every Friday, Saturday and Sunday Night. I had other plans the first weekend, however the second weekend I managed to go to two out of the three nights. It was quite the spectacle, but also a lot of fun as well. I am not quite sure on this but I believe a mixture of the bull riders are professionals, while the other half is people from the stands that want to ride. Or this is at least my assumption as several of my community members attempt to have me ride a bull. I try to get out of this by telling them that this year is only for learning to ride horses and we will see what next year brings…

Back to the fair part of the events, one thing I learned the first night that I went was that they build tents for several bars around the fair area (which is about the size of a football field). The fair area has various food vendors and little games set up in one area and fair rides, farris wheel and tea cups set up in another area. Well quite the surprise for me was that these bars they set up are a big hangout for homosexuals and cross dressers. This was quite the surprise as well they are quite the cultural taboo here in Nicaragua and seeing them next to bull riding, I guess I just don’t quite see the connection there. Anyways it was a blast, we left for the fiesta around 3 pm and didn’t get home until 1 am, which in Nicaragua time is like 6 am in the USA as most nights they are in bed around here at 8pm.

And with that I hope this two and a half page entry will suffice for a month of not posting and hope that I will be able to post more frequently in the future.

Some more pics for ya...

This first picture was taken a month or so into my time here. We hiked for roughly 3 hours up and down mountains to come to this amazing waterfall. Luckily I am now only 1.5 hrs away from it and my friend lives right next to it, so when anyone comes to visit my site we can definately check it out.
This pic comes from out training days. Eight trainees went to visit a volunteer for three days and when we got their we were greeted by the school children who put on a little play for us.
Another picture from tech days, this is a picture of five of us working on vaccinating chickens. It is a cool thing you can do with a youth group to makes some money and take the group on a trip. Which is an awesome thing as many of the children or adults of out comunities never get to see other parts of Nicaragua.
This is another picture of my sitemate Marlena. During out training days we got into a little mudfight (Yes I won, like always!).
So you wonder what I did for New Years! Here is a little tease, this is sunset on New Years Eve down here in Nicaragua. Ill give you some stories next time...

Hope all is well and Happy New Years!!!

So what does it really mean...

So this is the blog post to clarify some things...What does it really mean. I have realized that as I post stuff I am not clarifying the difference between how it is in the US and how it is Nica style...

Roads- Yes I do have road access to the Pan American Highway, which is quite nice. However no it is not paved and yes it definately has a lot of manure (both cow and horse) guiding the way. A little funny side note is that my town just completed a two week project where EVERYONE in the town helped out to expand it to a 2 lane road. The funny part is that we only have two vehicles in the WHOLE town. Thus it is now safe that if the two vehicles do meet paths they can cross safely.

Water- Yes I have access to safe drinking water, no I do not have sinks or a hot shower still. Instead I have a water spicket in my yard (much like the old time wells) in which I get all my water (shower, cooking and drinking).

Electricity- Yes I have electricity, however it is only two light bulbs and two electrical outlets. Also, while the President here has assured the public no more blackouts this year (yes he said this with only 15 days left in the year) our power already went out again last night. Blackouts are a regular thing here.

Wake up call- Yes I made the mistake of telling my host family that I could sleep through anything. Now i get the delight of a wake up call every morning at 6am. Oh but this is not a normal wakeup call they blast ranchero music (which is a lot like the worst music you could ever think of). They turn their radio as loud as it can go and think that I can hear my little wrist watch alarm. Yeah it wasnt working....but luckily I am living on my own how.

Shower- Yes i get to take wonderful cold bucket baths...but I also never mentioned that my shower is outside and only has 2.5 walls. Yup its a great show for all the little kids playing outside there with me.

Polisima- this is an event held every december for about 15 days in which the community honors Mother Mary. To do this everyone in the community celebrates at one person's house and the house changes every day. Well no families have any money for decorations, instead they tear down all the decorative plants in their front yard to amass a shrine to the Mother Mary. It is quite amazing the shrines they create, however it leaves their yard a complete disaster. Yeah Im thinking this tradition wont be starting anytime soon in the US.

Meat- Yes I get meat about 2-3 times per week, which is most then many families that I live with. However, I have not seen meet thats not attached to the bone. Oh how I crave a filet mignon.

Living Room Furniture- No there are not lazyboys and definately not couches. Instead we use hammocks (yup those are comfortable) but for chairs we get to enjoy those good ole plastic chairs that many people use for deck furniture back in the states.

*A little side note- once again I am still loving it down here. I do not post this as a slam against Nicaragua. However, I am just posting it so you get a more complete picture of what I see everyday.

Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Some more pics for you...

This picture shows David, but more importantly what most of the area around me looks like. Like I have mentioned I am surrounded by bean fields but also what you can see better in this picture is I live in the mountains. This is good and bad, first its absolutely beautiful. However it absolutely sucks to walk anywhere. Like I said in the pic below my closest site mate is Marlena, she is only 2 miles away, however there is a huge mountain I have to walk and can take up to an hour and a half walking back from her site.

Here is a picture taken from a project we just completed yesterday. We went to one of my neighboring volunteers sites and built an improved stove that will used less firewood, thus saving the environment and the family money. In this picture is David and Marlena, they are the two closest volunteers from my training group. Marlena is a 2 mile walk while David is only like an hour and half by a bus.

Here is the swearing-in picture I mentioned in the last blog. The joke is that we all greased our hair back for the swearing in ceremony, along with the greased hair many of us decided also to sport various facial hair styles. Well lets just say that the PC thought it was our way of being professional and dressing up and thought we were one of the best mannered ag groups in awhile. Sorry I dont have a picture of the whole group as the picture that I have is quite fuzzy and you cannot tell who each person is.

Here is a picture from my youth group going away party. There were four volunteers that worked with this group: myself, Greg on the upper left, Ivy is in the upper middle with blonde hair and a tiedye shirt and then Sarah is in the lower right with the tiedye shirt. This was the group of volunteers who lived in my training town and had spanish class with me. Unfortunately because of health problems Greg had to terminate his service early and return to the US. He was a great friend and will be missed over here.

This is a picture of my host family. Yes that is my first Nica shirt as they say, first shirt given to me down here in Nicaragua. It was a gift from my sister, Eymy. Eymy is the one on the right, then my host mom Marisol and my little sister Fatimah.

The big update!!!

Well its been a little while since I last posted so I will try to update you with as much as I can. Ill apologize in advance because it will definately ramble and it will definately have bad english. Sorry!

Anyways in the last three weeks I have sworn in as an official Peace Corps Volunteers, went to a conference of all volunteers in Nicaragua and have now moved into my permenant site for the next two years. Yes, I am now officially a resident of Nicaragua, how crazy is that. Only two years ago I didnt want to speak spanish for the rest of my entire life, only four months ago I couldn't even ask a question in spanish but now I am sitting in the middle of nowhere in Nicaragua and relying on spanish to survive....its quite startling at times.

Anyways its been a great three weeks, during the swearing in I got to hang out with all my friends down here for a week in Managua. It was good having everyone together but we had meetings everyday from 7am until almost 7pm at night when you include dinner. Also our hotel was near the airport which means that we were near no places to do anything fun. So most of the time we hung out at the pool, which was fun but when you have been out in the country for the past three months you just want to get out to a bar once in awhile. I got some nice pictures from the swearing in ceremony though as we all had to get dressed up and the ambassador from USA was there and spoke. All in all it was a pretty cool event. I will explain some more when I post some pictures of the event.

The all volunteer conference was fun meeting other volunteers. I acutally have a friend that is down here from UNC so it was good to see a friend from back in the states. But also it was a cool event because we could see projects that other people are working on that we can do in our site. Also people were selling things that they made in their villages so that was a good chance to pick up some small things for the new site.

So now the important stuff....THE NEW SITE!!!
My new site is really awesome. For the most it is really well organized which is great because lots of groups want to work with us. Thus I already have two projects set up..

Bean Project
My town is a bean town, they grow red beans. Thus they got a group to come in and support the building of a bodega, spanish for essential a building of silos, thus the town formed a cooporative and has began buying and selling beans. This is a great practice as during parts of the year the price of beans can triple. For example right now the price of beans is 15 cordobas per pound, while only 2 months ago the price was 3-5 cordobas per pound. (A side note the exchange rate is 18.5 cordobas per dollar) So with silos the group can buy beans when they are really cheap and then sell them once the price goes up. The bad part of this project is that only one person has a truck to transport the beans, thus he is the person in charge of making the sales. Now the only way to make sure he is not keeping the money for himself is to get a bill of sales, pretty simple and logical. Well the problem is that the town trusted him so much that they havent ever asked for these bill of sales. Also, when your tripling your investment most people are just happy to have the money and dont ask questions. Well the town noticed that he has accumulated quite a bit of wealth (which I think most of this wealth is because he has a brother in the US that is sending him money), but anyway the town decided they wanted to see the bill of sales for the last month. Well lucky me he doesnt have any and all hell broke loose. My first week here I am going to a meeting and there is all this yelling back and forth and my spanish is not good enough to understand all that is going on. So the gist that I get is that they questioned the guy and he said he has never received bill of sales, he then questioned the group who could make a bigger profit then he has been making, which of course no one can because no one has a truck to sell the beans. So the way I am taking it is that they just wanted to call him out and he will have to get bill of sales from now on. Anyway this meeting was like four days ago and everyone is all friendly so I dont think anything major is going to come out of it. I guess when you live in a town of 400 people you cant be mad at people for too long!
So my part of this project is to work with them on business projects and for the long term they want to export the beans so I will be working on figuring out how to do this.

Pig Project.
This will be more of my project that I will work on. Essentially the town was given money to start a project of reproducing pigs. There will be 55 families in the community divided into 11 groups, 5 families per group. Each group will be given funds to build a pig pen and also be given a pig. There will be 10 female pigs and 1 male pigs. Right now the breed of pig in my town is not very good. On average they have between 4-6 babies per litter. The new pig that we will be getting (Yorkshire for you piggy fans out there) has 10-12 babies per litter. Thus over the years we will have quite an influx of pigs that we will then sell or eat.

So those will be my two main projects, on top of these I will be working on making new stoves that use less firewood, painting world and Nicaragua maps on the local school, working on gardens and etc.

Other updates:

Horse update- I think I have mentioned before that the best transport in my town is by horse, thus I have started talking to a couple people in the town and told them I want a horse. They said they will start looking but I told them to hold off until January. My month of December is extremely busy and I also dont want to give off an impression of a rich american.

Cat- I was given the cutest little cat by the volunteer before me. She keeps my house free of rats, scorpions, snakes and all the other fun stuff. The only problem is she has like 9-12 babies a year. So I will be giving out a lot of free gifts to the community.

Two funny stories....
Beans, beans and more beans.
So like I said before I live in a bean town. This is good because beans are expensive and thus if I didnt live in a bean town I probably wouldnt be eatting beans right now. But with that said I am at the other extreme. I have beans and coffee for breakfast, I have beans and a tortilla for lunch, and I have beans and chicken for dinner. At times I feel like Im on Survivor for how many beans can I eat in a week. I have scientific proof that I can eat over 21 lbs of red beans in a week (7 days a week, 1 lb of beans per meal, 3 meals per day). Anyway the bad part of this is that I am pooping a lot like a deer now, except its not pebbles is beans coming out. The good part is beans are selling for a lot now so it is an extra source of income.

A little roll in the carpet...
So I know my family is really big in weekend projects but my new family beats any project I have ever seen done. See the the families are really poor down here, thus many have dirt floors. Well my new family that I am staying in has a dirt floor, and well I am not quite sure why (Perhaps there was a little hill forming that I didnt notice, or they wanted to creat a put-put golf course in living room, not quite sure) but this weekend my mom broke out a bucket of water and the machete and went to town on the living room floor. For over an hour she was rearranging the dirt and what not and when I returned home an hour later there was a "new floor" in the living room.